Chicago · industrial engineer

Aly ElBanna

Industrial engineer. I make work flow.

Builder by habit. I take the slow, repetitive, error-prone parts of an operation and turn them into systems that run on their own, prove they ran, and only interrupt a person when something actually changed.

SCROLL
What I do

Efficiency is a design problem. I design for it.

Process design

Map how the work really moves, find where it waits, and remove the wait. The best step is the one nobody has to do.

Automation

Once a process is understood, it can be run by software: portals driven, files built, checks made, results delivered, every night, without a hand on it.

Data you can act on

Numbers pulled from where they live, compared with yesterday's, and shown as the one line that matters. No dashboards for their own sake.

Systems that watch themselves

Heartbeats, watchdogs and quiet confirmations, so a system that stops is noticed by the system, not by the person who needed it.

How I think

Three rules I do not break.

1

Measure before you fix

Every improvement starts with a number: how long, how often, how many hands. If it cannot be measured, it is an opinion.

2

Refuse to guess

When a system is not sure, it says so and stops. A confident wrong answer costs more than an honest missing one.

3

Build it to be left alone

A tool that needs a person standing next to it has only moved the work. Done means it runs, proves it ran, and asks for help only when it should.

About

Engineer. Builder. Chicago.

I work in the construction industry, where the gap between how a process is supposed to run and how it actually runs is measured in days and dollars. I spend my time closing that gap: studying the work, automating what should never have been manual, and leaving behind systems that keep running after I walk away.

If you have a process that eats your week, I would like to hear about it.